The UK immigration system needs to deliver on a number of levels, including allowing sufficient flow of labour to supply economic demand whilst protecting UK citizens from threats such as terrorism and crime.
However, in recent years, particularly after the hysterical rhetoric of Brexit agitators gained ground, the immigration system has simultaneously become a significant key to power and one of the least rational areas of government policy.
Indefensible policies
No genuinely objective observer could defend choices such as allegedly spending £700mn on an unlikely, and probably illegal, Rwanda asylum processing scheme. Only four asylum applicants relocated to Rwanda whilst the Rwanda scheme was in force, and they left under a separate relocation scheme.
Nor would they defend our giving the French government millions of pounds to provide beach patrols for reducing the flow of those small boat crossings that became problematic after the UK left the EU and exited the Dublin Regulation.
The latest UK government funding arrangement of £662million over 3 years to the French government to curb small boat crossings, could pay for well over ten million GP consultations, at a time when a face-to-face GP appointment remains difficult to secure in a timely manner.
But somehow these very public announcements continue to be emitted by a Labour government that many voters had hoped might have made different choices, unencumbered by immediate blame for the consequences of Brexit on our nation and, in particular, its immigration system.
Can’t the UK ‘grow’ its own workforce?
There will always be tensions between competing demands placed on the immigration system. On the one hand, a significant proportion of British voters have been persuaded that immigration has negatively impacted wage levels and access to accommodation and public services (particularly GP appointments and NHS waiting lists). On the other hand, farmers need seasonal workers and the construction and hospitality industries, along with the NHS, need a steady supply of skilled, but relatively low-paid workers.
Firstly, low-paid and seasonal workers are not necessarily low skilled workers, and nor is it the case that UK nationals can simply do these jobs if given the ‘right’ incentives.
For example, people who used to arrive in numbers from European nations each summer to pick fruit and harvest vegetables were not low-skilled workers easily replaced by UK citizens. While this is partly a matter of training, the UK is simply no longer set up to support a large group of ‘home-grown’ seasonal workers. Our employment culture has moved on and so has our nation’s infrastructure – the support system for mobile, seasonal working no longer exists in the UK. The vast majority of UK workers now expect to take all year-round jobs and live in one place.
Farmers depend on fruit pickers from abroad who spend the summer in UK and then move relatively quickly on to other jobs on the European mainland or back to their homelands.
The evidence is being drowned out by political pressure
And what of the impact of immigration on home-grown, low-paid workers’ wages? In 2021, the Nobel prize for economics was won by a team who demonstrated that immigration had little or no impact on wages. Drawing on a large-scale study of the arrival of around 125,000 refugees from Cuba into Miami in the 1980s, the University of California team concluded that this movement, which increased the city’s labour force by 7%, didn’t “reduce the wages of native-born workers”.
Additionally, recent studies by the Migration Observatory, found a small marginal impact on the wages of the lowest paid workers from increased migration; the largest impact falls on the most recent immigrants, rather than on more established parts of the population. So, arguably, these impacts, so often used as political levers, are of limited significance.
But this doesn’t mean they lack political traction. Government after government has built policy around anti-immigrant narratives which are widely spread on social media and uncritically aired on mainstream platforms, including by both dedicated right-wing broadcasters (such as GBNews and TalkTV) and mainstream/establishment media outlets (including the publicly funded BBC News).
And all this effort is delivering actual results, with recent net immigration figures plunging so vertiginously that forecasts of net zero migration are currently being posited. If such a net zero outcome is ‘achieved’, GDP could, according to a study by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research, possibly decrease by 3.6%.
The immigration plunge
With immigration already plunging – down almost half (48%) on the year ending 2025 and more than four-fifths since the 2023 peak – the UK government will soon have to reframe the argument and reassess its recent decisions, or else risk another economic crisis on the scale of Brexit. For anyone unencumbered by party allegiances and/or ideological obsessions, the prospect of the UK plunging into a deeper economic crisis would spur immediate action. However, as we have seen from consecutive UK government responses to the absolute (economic and diplomatic) catastrophe of Brexit, knowing the facts doesn’t lead to quick rational action.
Beyond a fear of admitting being wrong, political pressures are pushing the UK government into maintaining policies that will almost certainly create future problems.
Even now, after a change of prime minister, the Home Office seems to be the only office of state that PM Burnham has not reassessed, with Shabana Mahmood retaining her post and no amendments posited to a recently published immigration bill that further eroded human rights and was openly criticised by 80 Labour MPs. Within a broader political perspective, the far-right narrative that immigration is universally bad has also been further legitimised.
Will the current immigration bill change anything?
It seems unlikely that the current immigration bill, published June 30, will significantly impact the numbers. However, it will continue the narrative and strip more rights from those seeking refuge in the UK (including by limiting the definition of ‘family’ to spouses and parents with children under 18). It also introduces the Independent Immigration Appeals Authority, establishing the authority as a primary assessment body that will consider primary appeals. While supposedly independent of the UK Government, it will, concerningly, operate from within the Home Office.
Even more worryingly, EU citizens who lived in the UK before Brexit came into effect and were promised settled status are now being told to leave. This surely, is a step too far for our, or indeed any, Labour government?
The new bill will probably have little effect on the overall plummeting trend of net immigration and will also not positively contribute to the immigration debate, including one focussed on showing that the UK needs immigration to meet its growth targets. This is significant because the UK government has repeatedly said that increased economic growth is its primary objective.
Who is immigration policy working (or not working) for?
We started with the question: Who is this immigration policy supposed to be working for? The answer seems to be the UK government in its short-term objective of attracting voters away from the xenophobic Reform UK and Restore Britain, the even more extreme competitor that inhabits the very furthest reaches of the far-right. Meanwhile, the Conservative Party seems to be making very little impact – hardly surprising given that there is so little room between Labour and Reform on immigration policy, and that net migration continues to fall so precipitously.
Immigration policy is not working for businesses and the majority of the UK population who, like all of those willing to look, can see the real prospect of further economic pain. And Labour’s anti-immigration strategy is also failing in political terms, with party losses to the Green Party exceeding its gains from right-wing voters in the recent council elections.
What would a rational immigration policy look like?
In a rational world, the UK government would be planning to attract those who fit into its growth strategy. For example, given that Labour has pledged to build 1.5m new homes, it would surely make sense to try to attract skilled labour to meet this target, while training our own labour force and improving conditions and rewards. This would seem sensible especially at a time when the National Federation of Builders is complaining that, post-Brexit and post 2025, immigration rules have made it harder to source required labour. Labour is already behind on its ‘new homes’ pledge, with the Home Builders Federation warning the target will be missed after only 208,600 new homes were completed in 2024/25.
Looking at the key area of healthcare, and particularly adult social care, the UK government is currently spending political capital on finding a cross-party solution to a struggling and unfair system. But if there is no supply of skilled labour willing to take comparatively low paid work, this seems a remote aspiration at best, with migrants currently accounting for about one-third (32 percent) of adult care sector workers.
In tertiary education, where international student fees provide one-fifth of UK higher education institution total income, there has been a 42% decrease in international students (substantially impacted by recent immigration policies). Universities UK claims that if this continues up to the academic year 2028/29, it will result in an annual revenue loss of £4bn.
If the UK government really wants to deliver on its election promises, then it can no longer afford to sacrifice reality-based policies on the altar of staving off attacks from xenophobic populist political vehicles, such as Reform UK. The narrative must change, quickly. Sadly, PM Burnham’s insistence on maintaining the Home Office status quo suggests he does not really understand this, nor the challenge our nation is facing. I hope he can change the narrative in time, but for now the jury (independent appeals authority in the case of asylum seekers) is out.
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